One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
My copy of the 1963 novel that won Alexander Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize is thirty-six years old, and it looks it--not just because it is dog-eared and the pages tinged yellow, but because the jacket copy is thick with Cold War fever. This copy, for example, is "THE COMPLETE, UNEXPURGATED TRANSLATION BY RONALD HINGLEY AND MAX HAYWARD." One Day is "A SHATTERING PORTRAIT OF LIFE INSIDE STALINIST RUSSA.' It is also: "the terrifying story of an almost unbelievable man-made hell--the Soviet work camps--and of one man's heroic struggle to survive in the face of the most determined efforts to destroy him--a scathing indictment of Communist tyranny that has shaken the whole Soviet world."My edition also, conveniently, includes Solzhenitsyn's "now-classic letter of protest against censorship." The author himself spent eight years in these labor camps, and three more years in exile, all for the crime of making derogatory comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend.I was bemused by the shrieking of the book cover, but you understand that I began the story of Ivan Denisovich with the understanding that I would be led to dark places. I anticipated something depressing. Probably somebody, or many bodies, would die. There would be no color. It would be a Tragedy, fitted into a narrative understanding of Hope and Human Possibility. I happen to be a big lover of big old Russian books. I was ready for it all.But something strange happened, something that turned my expectations around and made me admire Solzhenitsyn all the more.This one day of Ivan Denisovitch Shukhov's life is actually a rather good one. Check out one of the last paragraphs:Shukhov went to sleep, and he was very happy. He'd had a lot of luck today. They hadn't put him in the cooler. The gang hadn't been chased out to work in the Socialist Community Development. He'd finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon. The boss had gotten them good rates for their work. He'd felt good making that wall. They hadn't found that piece of steel (he'd hidden on his body) in the frisk. Ceasar had paid him off in the evening. He'd bought some tobacco. And he'd gotten over that sickness.Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy.This is the author's brilliant move. In a short novel in a dreary and unjust landscape, he gives us a protagonist who we come to like, and who sleeps happily at the end. It is the dissonance of what makes Shukhov so happy, and what we readers hope for him--it is that gap in between--that makes this novel sing. Solzhenitsyn takes readerly expectations--like the ones I had--and turns them on us. We keep waiting for something to go terribly wrong for Shukhov that breaks that day up. But of all the things that happen--the scenes--things turn, if any way, in his favor. That "Tragedy" catharsis is never fulfilled; it's just an ordinary. But the narrative makes clear that this--only this--is the best Shukhov can hope for. He falls asleep at the end, and we know soon he will wake up, and the morning will look exactly like it did on page one.I think it's a wonderful narrative strategy, and its couched in plain speech--short paragraphs, lots of dialogue, few adjectives and adverbs, zero lyricism--that is absolutely appropriate. Another terrific narrative strategy: naming. From the title, you open the book ready to meet "Ivan Denisovich." Rather, you start following around "Shukhov," and it takes a bit to realize they are one and the same. The few times when Shukhov is called by his title name are significant. Again, Solzhenitsyn reveals impressive ability to manipulate reader expectations. When we come to meet the protagonist, we're looking for his dignified, formal, public name--full first name and patronymic, classic traditional Russian. Who we find in his stead is a man reduced to the blunt two syllables of his last name. He is at first unrecognizable to us, who've never met him, as he might be also unrecognizable to his former self, or to the family he is forgetting. But there is a thing about the language. With all due respect to Mssrs. Hingley and Hayward, I didn't like my translation. It can be hard to parse out responsibility for the language of a translated book, but I feel pretty confident in laying this one in the hands of the H-H team. First of all, I was frustrated by the rendition of the work camp slang and swearing, which is posited as being hard-edged. Some of the awfully dated 1970s slang is worthy of eye-rolls, but forgivable. Other times it wasn't so much the old-timey insult that threw me off, but an awkwardly worded phrase construction that is intended to spat out or shouted, but comes off as formal and ridiculous. It did pull me out of the story. Often, actually, in this heavily voiced novel.Second, the translators chose a weird strategy for--well, you can't call them endnotes or footnotes, because they appear in the beginning of the book, all of them, before chapter one. None of them are numbered; they are marked in the text as an asterisk that alerts the reader to turn back to the beginning of the book and run her finger down the list to find the word that appears after the last word she looked up. It's bizarre. I didn't like how it made me move through the book. On the bright side, the explanations were simple and clear and few.But if Solzhenitsyn can survive Soviet labor camp, he can survive a poor translation.The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." He was not able to speak at the prize ceremony--it seems that his acceptance speech was smuggled out of the USSR. But this is what he said (and it is, in full, really quite something):"But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against 'freedom of print,' it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin--interred alive throughout their lives--are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation."In some cases moreover--when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety--it is a danger to the whole of mankind."
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." -- Fyodor DostoevskyThis book was a good way to take my mind off of my own problems. Reading about the grueling conditions of a Soviet gulag made my daily worries seem trivial.The novel is set in Stalin's Russia of the 1950s and follows the prisoner Shukhov from the moment he wakes up at 5 a.m. to when he finally goes to bed after laboring all day. Shukhov was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor, even though he was innocent. While fighting for Russia in World War II, he was captured by the Germans. He managed to escape and return to his own lines, but then he was accused of being a spy. Faced with being shot or doing hard labor, he signed a confession to spare his life.Shukhov has already served eight years and knows how to survive in prison. He stays out of trouble and tries to do small favors for people who can get him a little extra food each day. He is a hard worker and believes that prisoners have to help each other to stay alive. He learned this lesson from his first squad leader, who told the new inmates: "Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The ones that don't make it are those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies."The prisoners are forced to work in brutally cold weather and have very little food. This book makes you appreciate being warm and well-fed, to be sure. When Shukhov is refused a favor from a guard who works indoors and who sits near a heater, he wonders, "How can you expect a man who's warm to understand a man who's cold?"In other sections, we see how important it is to eat slowly and to treasure each bite: "More than once during his life in the camps, Shukhov had recalled the way they used to eat in his village: whole pots full of potatoes, pans of oatmeal, and, in the early days, big chunks of meat. And milk enough to bust their guts. That wasn't the way to eat, he learned in camp. You had to eat with all your mind on the food -- like now, nibbling the bread bit by bit, working the crumbs up into a paste with your tongue and sucking it into your cheeks. And how good it tasted -- that soggy black bread!"While reading "One Day," I was reminded of some other great books about work camps, such as "Escape from Camp 14," which was about a North Korean prison, and several about the Holocaust: Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," Elie Wiesel's "Night" and Art Spiegelman's "Maus." Each of those books has their own insights into how people survive in subhuman conditions. I appreciated the spare, straightforward language of Solzhenitsyn. According to the introduction, Solzhenitsyn himself had served eight years in a Russian concentration camp, reportedly for making a derogatory remark about Stalin. The book was published in 1962 during Khrushchev's reign, and was considered an attack on Stalin's human rights violations. I admired Solzhenitsyn for having the courage to tell this story.
What do You think about One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich (2005)?
I'm slowly getting sucked into the world of audiobooks and loving them more and more, but I nearly abandoned this one. I am glad I didn't, though.This Blackstone edition suffers from one of the most painful voices I have ever heard -- some guy named Richard Brown. He has a nasally, whiny, smoke-too-much voice that grates the ears the way skin grates when a thumb slips off a carrot and gets shredded. He makes no attempt to offer performance of any sort, opting instead for straight reading. No variations of emotion, no variations of tone or vocal quality, just him reading Solzhenitsyn's words translated (albeit from H.T. Willets' reputedly excellent authorized translation) into English.My kids listened to about an hour of the story one day while we were driving, and much to my surprise, they loved it. Bronte said that Brown sounded really cool and that his voice was perfect. She got me thinking, and I had to admit that she was onto something. His voice is perfect. His adanoidal drone, the sort of voice you'd expect from a "evil" English rodent in an animated movie, was perfectly suited to Ivan Denisovich Shukov, the carpenter/bricklayer/"spy"/zek banished to a Siberian Gulag in Stalinist USSR.Brown's voice really does capture the grind of camp life. The crushing weight of scrounging for food, working for pride despite the hardship, the biting cold, the loyalties and pities that dictate every minute of every day, all that camp life must have been is contained in that torturous voice. So listening to this translation to the dissonant sound of Brown's voice turned out to be a rewarding experience. By the end I really liked it. But I am still going to have to cut off a star from this edition because I came so close to turning it off and not going back. Still, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich itself gets five stars. There's no diminishing its brilliance.
—Brad
How do we measure a life greatly lived? Is it what’s left behind by the person living it (some monument to his/her wherewithal or creativity)? Is it the family s/he births and raises? Is it the way s/he dies? Or is it the way s/he lives regardless of accolades or remembrance or emotion?Ivan Denisovich Shukov lives his life, day to day, the way I aspire to live my own. He lives it for survival and simple pleasures. He tastes everything he eats. He hears everything his ears pick up. He sees everything that cross his eyes. He senses everything his wind-chill numbed fingers touch. He smells the most minute scents despite his smoking. He feels EVERYTHING. And that, to me, is a life greatly lived. Shukov lives on the edge of mortality and that, in turn puts him on the edge of sensation, which is where I think we should all be. I want to go and by a tiny piece of sausage tonight; I want to put it in my mouth before bed and revel in its juices. It’s what Ivan would do. it is what I should do; it is what we all should do. Solzhenitsyn had it right. He knew life and living. He should thank Stalin for his time in the camps. It was the core of his greatness, of the life he lived greatly. All I can hope for is to enjoy the sausage. As thoroughly as possible.
—Brad
I have read so many novels with concentration camps as setting so this classic and controversial book just did not really have much impact to me. In fact, this day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is comparable to just another day in the life of K.D. Absolutely.You see, there are days when K.D. Absolutely is sick but he has to go to the office because he needs to work for his family. He is the breadwinner because his wife has already retired after 20 plus years of working trying to augment what income K.D. Absolutely makes to support the family. Not that K.D. Absolutely is complaining. In fact, he is grateful to his wife who had to help him in putting food on the table and paying the bills. Now that K.D. Absolutely is alone trying to earn money to support their daughter who is still in the university, he is also thinking of saving up for their retirement. That life when both of them are already retired seems like a big question mark in K.D. Absolutely's mind. How does he make sure that his savings are enough for him and his wife to have a comfortable twilight years? Given the high cost of hospitalization and medicines not to mention the daily life's necessities?The life of Ivan Denisovich in the gulag has nothing to do with his retirement and he is still young. His concern is mostly about food. He leaves his plate sparklingly clean because he licks every surface if there is still some kind of flavor clinging on it. It does not matter if it is sausage or some kind of boiled grass, he either finishes them all of or he leaves some for the rainy day. He even knows how to get more food, e.g. befriending the office worker Tsezar who has some access to food. Ivan Denisovich is there in the gulag because he was suspected to be a German spy during WWII. Even if he is in fact, innocent, he still gets incarcerated and has been there to serve his sentence for ten years.I will not give the details of my life in the office because I might get the attention of my bosses especially because my book reviews (or rants really) get posted on Facebook and you just don't know who reads what in this time in cyberspace. However, my days nowadays are similar to that of Ivan Denisovich in terms of surviving the heavy workload: I am just swamped to the extent that I could not visit Goodreads and Facebook during workdays. Last year, I still could open my GR in the morning to type in a book review and click on the like button to the delight of some of my Facebook friends. Last year, I could finish one book a day because 8 hours of honest work in the office was enough. Last year, I could even read books during my one-hour lunch break at noontime. Now, all of those have to go. I just work and work because assignments keep on coming like crazy.And it just felt that life in the office for me is just like the modern version of Solzhenitsyn's gulag. Even if I have money to buy food, oftentimes, I don't have the time to go out to buy even from the ground floor's bakery. The work is challenging (hello, boss!) but it is dizzying (from lack of sleep) and you always hope and pray "God please show me the light even just a flicker" as you work on the many assignments that you have to finish on time.
—K.D. Absolutely
